The hot-and-cold Anaheim Ducks are downright torrid now, but if you want to put their overall body of work in perspective, peek at their record after a 2-1 win against the Pittsburgh Penguins. (Click here to see Teemu Selanne’s game-winning [and historic] goal.)

24-24-9 for 57 points.

As hot as the Ducks have been – and as eerily familiar as this run is becoming compared to last season’s surge – the team is just now at .500. That doesn’t sound like the stuff of a Western Conference playoff team, but let’s dig a little deeper.

The cold, nerdy perspective

Sports Club Stats is the generally agreed-upon source for sober analysis of every team’s playoff chances. That site’s forecast of the Ducks’ chances isn’t very sunny right now: they’re currently at 6 percent, which places them 13th overall in the West.

The schedule

Anaheim’s immediate future doesn’t lend much in the way of optimism – at least if you ignore the context of its scalding run. The Ducks still have four road games in a row and five of their next six away from Anaheim. There’s also a four-out-of-five away run to in early March.

Trending up

That schedule bit can only rain on the Ducks’ parade so much because they’ve gone 3-0-1 in the first half of their current eight-game road trip. The Ducks are also enjoying a seven-game points streak (5-0-2) and have been hot in general since the New Year, putting together an impressive 14-3-3 mark.

The big picture

Excluding the four bubble teams in front of them for the sake of sanity, the Ducks are six points behind eighth-place Phoenix and trail the Blackhawks and Kings by eight as of this writing. Anaheim has 11 home and 14 road games remaining on its schedule.

Circling back to Sports Club Stats, the Ducks would have a 61.1 percent chance to make the playoffs if they go 16-7-2, a 78 percent chance if they go 16-6-3 and so on. In other words, they’d need to more-or-less duplicate the great work from 2012 while hoping that some of their peers stumble.

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The Ducks face a steep mountain, but they did last season as well. Can they do it again? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Minnesota Wild goalie Devan Dubnyk has been the most difficult goalies to score against this season. Leave it to a high-level player like Leon Draisaitl to make it look this, well, “easy.”

Draisaitl scored his 13th goal of 2016-17 by capping this pretty give-and-go play with Benoit Pouliot. You can see the frustration from Dubnyk at the end of the tally, as if he was saying “How was I supposed to stop that?” (though probably with more colorful language).

Draisaitl came into Friday with five goals and three assists in his last five games, so he’s been almost unstoppable lately.